Relieved that police spying has ended, Muslim groups say law enforcement must do more

Local Muslim groups on Wednesday applauded the New York City Police Department's decision to disband a unit that tracked the daily lives of Muslims, including many in New Jersey. But they said it would take a lot more work from law enforcement to regain the trust of communities that had felt unfairly singled out by the program.

"It shows there is a concern about civil rights and the civil liberties of minorities, and that's good news towards rebuilding the relationship," said Mohamed El Filali, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "It's not just disbanding this unit that will resolve the problem."

The so-called Demographics Unit had for years sent plainclothes NYPD officers to mingle with Muslims in bookstores, restaurants and mosques, where they were tasked to listen for terrorist plots. Their targets included a mosque in Paterson and student groups at 16 Northeast colleges, including Rutgers University.

Its disbanding, announced this week, was expected to be followed by the dismantling of other parts of a huge post-9/11 intelligence-gathering mechanism in the NYPD, as new Police Commissioner William Bratton overhauls the department with an eye toward easing tensions with the city's racial minorities.

The effort reverberated across the Hudson, where local leaders had strenuously objected to the spying program, saying it sowed anxiety and unease in their communities and undermined cooperation with law enforcement.

"It's certainly going to help, but at this point, its up to the law enforcement to actually prove this," said Ahmed Al-Shehab, the New Jersey-based national board director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "They're not going to get a free pass anymore."

Al-Shehab and El Filali said they would like to see revisions to police training manuals to reflect more diversity among the Islamic community and more communication from federal border agents about why some people get stopped when they are trying to travel internationally and what they could do to remove themselves from no-fly lists.

New Jersey State Police Capt. Stephen Jones said, however, that the agency's relationship with the Muslim community has been steadily improving for years, regardless of the fallout from the NYPD program.

"What we're doing is trying to foster a good, trusting relationship that goes two ways, that's going to benefit everybody in the state," he said.

Police officials with New Jersey's homeland security department and the Attorney General's Office meet weekly with Muslim community leaders in different parts of the state, he said. Those meetings focus on community concerns and law enforcement initiatives, such as an expo planned in Atlantic City geared toward attracting interest from the Muslim community in law enforcement careers.

"This is not an intelligence-gathering effort. This is about building relationships," Jones said.

The existence of the New York police spying program, first revealed by The Associated Press, had come as a surprise to local Muslim leaders, who also expressed shock when they learned that New Jersey authorities had cooperated with the program.

A review of the unit under Bratton found that the same demographic information could be better collected through direct contact with community groups.

Among other anti-terror programs that are getting a hard look from Bratton is a unit that stations NYPD officers in foreign cities such as London, Paris, Tel Aviv and Amman, Jordan. Also under review are the protocols for when and how to conduct surveillance in the hunt for terrorists.